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Home , Ali Allawi, Fard, Islamic Dawa Party, Kanan Makiya

Judith and Sidney Swartz Director Prof. Shai Feldman Is Viable? Associate Director Kristina Cherniahivsky Prof. Kanan Makiya

Assistant Director for Research Naghmeh Sohrabi, PhD Editors’ Note Senior Fellows Abdel Monem Said Aly, PhD Earlier this year, Prof. Kanan Makiya, Sylvia Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Khalil Shikaki, PhD Eastern Studies at Brandeis, delivered a lecture at the Crown Center on the sectarian nature of Iraq and its prospects for survival as a viable, unified state. Drawing on years of Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the professional and personal experience, Prof. Makiya pondered the question of whether Iraq, Nader Habibi, PhD as a political and social entity, has ever really existed—and, if it has, whether it still does exist. As editors of Middle East Briefs we believe that Prof. Makiya’s lecture is an important The Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies document that must be considered in any debate about Iraq’s future. Hence, we have decided Kanan Makiya, PhD to make an updated version of his lecture available to our readers. Lecturer on the Myra and Robert Kraft Chair in Arab Politics Lawrence Rubin n March 25, 2008, the Iraqi government launched a military operation against units of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Postdoctoral Fellows O Ondrej Beranek, PhD Army operating in the militia-controlled city of Howard Eissenstat, PhD Yusri Hazran, PhD Basra. The prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was forthright Vincent Romani, PhD in affirming that the target of the operation was the Mahdi President of Jehuda Reinharz, PhD Army, even though the military, in an attempt to keep the ceasefire announced by al-Sadr in August of 2007, has insisted that the fighting was only against “rogue” elements of that army. Since then the fighting has expanded to Sadr City, the Mahdi Army’s stronghold, and to some southern governorates of Iraq, with Iraqi and coalition forces achieving a growing number of tactical military successes even as Muqtada al-Sadr continues to press for ceasefires and political engagement. 1 September 2008 The fighting represents the most dramatic escalation of intra-Shi‘a conflicts No. 30 to date, and is at bottom a struggle for power within the political bloc that benefited the most from the 2005 Iraqi elections. In an important sense it is a continuation of the logic of the 2005–2006 civil war between the Sunni and Shi‘a Arabs of Iraq, only this time around the fighting is taking place not between the big communal sectarian blocs, but within them. The intra-Sunni struggle, culminating in strategic setbacks for al-Qaeda in Iraq, preceded that within Iraq’s Shi‘a, and the various Sunni contending forces are now set to enter a more political phase of competition focused around the upcoming provincial elections scheduled for the fall of 2008. By contrast, the extremely diverse non-homogeneous Shi‘a political parties that won control of the state in 2005 are at the very beginning of their internal settling of accounts with one another.

What does this bout of fighting tell us about the sectarian genie that was let out of the bottle by the American 2003 war, and by the behavior of the new Iraqi political class empowered by that war—the subject of the article below? It tells us, first, that the government of Nouri al-Maliki has essentially allied itself with the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (and with its militia, the Badr Brigade), run as a fiefdom by the family, against Maliki’s former ally, Muqtada al-Sadr (and his militia, the Mahdi Army). In that sense, nothing of a strategic nature has changed in Iraqi post-2003 politics as a result of the behavior of the Maliki government. On the other hand, the fighting opens up the possibility that the Maliki government is, for the first time since it came into power, beginning to assert the “Iraqiness” of Iraq over the logic of sectarian identity politics that won it the 2005 elections. The central state, which had been so atomized and broken up after 2003, may, in other words, be coming back into the picture. But these are early days yet—too early to say which of these two tendencies present in the situation created by the recent fighting will prevail.

Is Iraq Viable?

The execution of the former president of Iraq, , on December Kanan Makiya is the 30, 2006, was one of those intensely clarifying moments in politics when a psychological tipping point gets crossed—one which, in the case of Iraq, was Sylvia K. Hassenfeld overshadowed by the everyday death toll and the awfulness of daily life since April Professor of Islamic and 2003. Following the sentencing, the execution was rushed through by the Maliki Middle Eastern Studies at government in the face of strong American objections. A bitter standoff ensued between top American and Iraqi officials over whether or not it should take Brandeis University. place at that particular point in time. Its timing had been accelerated to coincide with the day Sunnis everywhere celebrate as the Great Eid, marking the end of , the most venerated and blessed month of the Islamic calendar.

Until the execution, it was easy to blame everything that had gone wrong in Iraq on the insurgency; on the lack of planning before the U.S. invasion, and the provision of troop levels inadequate to administer an occupation; on the conflicts within the U.S. government; and on all the other perfectly legitimate criticisms of the American 2003 enterprise. But Saddam’s trial—over a 1982 atrocity in the village of Dujail, where he ordered the execution of 1431 people for a failed assassination attempt organized by the followers of the Dawa Party—and then his execution on orders of the leader of that party, who was also the prime minister The opinions and findings expressed in this of Iraq, taught that perhaps the real Achilles heel of the American undertaking in essay are those of the author exclusively, and Iraq was their Iraqi allies—put in power by the American military, and to whom do not reflect the official positions or policies Saddam’s trial and execution had been entrusted. of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies or Brandeis University. Everything that the Iraqi dictator represented in politics ought to have been put under a microscope during the trial and on the day of his execution. But it

2 wasn’t. No one put the whole system of government that outside the government. Over and over again they repeat had for so long terrorized the people of Iraq on trial. No how victimized the Shi‘a of Iraq were under Sunni rule, one acknowledged in public and before the eyes of the which they equate with that of the Baath. But in a contest world the terrible injustices that had been perpetrated between them and Saddam Hussein over who is more on millions of innocent and undeserving victims of that profoundly sectarian, the objective observer would have a system. No one made even the slightest reference to the hard time coming to a conclusion. fact that Sunnis, too, had died under Saddam, along with Kurds and Christians and Turkomans and Yezidis. Doing When the political leadership at such a historic moment so would have given all Iraqis some investment in the new of opportunity so consistently fails to see what is in the order—a small measure of affirmation that the new state national interest, howsoever defined, and acts instead in belonged to them as well. It might have been the first step accordance with the narrowest and most sectarian frame toward putting forth the notion of a different Iraq from of reference imaginable, more fundamental questions are the one that Saddam Hussein had so dominated during his raised. This was, after all, a genuinely elected leadership. thirty-five years in power. On the most fundamental level, therefore, one must wonder if the world is asking too much of it, and of the people who Why choose to minimize the criminality of the outgoing voted it into office. regime when it had gone to such lengths to victimize everyone? Surely the point of trying and executing Saddam Hazem Saghie, a Lebanese writer and senior editor at was to magnify his regime’s criminality—to treat that the daily Al-Hayat, has provided a historical and regime as a prime offender against the very condition sociological analysis of Iraq that suggests just that. Saghie of being a human being. Saddam’s crimes should have has examined what made the Baathist system work—and, been compared to those of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and all by implication, why one cannot expect fundamentally the other monsters of the twentieth century. But such different behavior from those who replaced Saddam comparisons were not made. Hussein. His argument, if correct, has a bearing on whether or not it makes sense to even talk about a country called But if Saddam’s trial was flawed, the execution was a Iraq—much less bring democracy to it, as so many Iraqi disaster. A grainy clip of film shot secretly in the execution democrats hoped to do in the months preceding the 2003 chamber with a mobile phone showed the great dictator war.2 standing erect and defiant before a jeering rabble chanting, “Muqtada, Muqtada.” Why were they there? Whom did Saghie rightly begins with the nature of the outgoing they represent? Was the prime minister of Iraq so beholden regime. His point is that Baathism is not in the end to Muqtada al Sadr, a thirty-year-old cleric who had had comparable to European totalitarianism—a comparison the son of a grand , Majid al-Khoei, murdered in I made in my Republic of Fear—because all the modern the shrine of Ali, the holiest site of Shiism, on the day trappings of the Baath Party “were a mere pretext for the of Iraq’s liberation? Muqtada had never criticized Saddam primordial community’s [i.e., the Sunnis’] assumption of before 2003. But modern Shi‘a supporters returning from power, and consequently of control [over the] society.”3 exile, former friends of Majid, had begun to court and He opens his argument with this telling question: “When flatter Muqtada, telling him that he was leading a popular speaking of Saddam Hussein’s terror in Iraq, the names of revolution when he rose up against the American presence his sons, brothers and cousins come to mind.... Yet does in Iraq in April 2004. Now his thugs were picking up any ordinary person know whether Hitler had a brother, Sunnis at night and torturing them before slitting their or whether Stalin had any cousins, and if he did what their throats. Had the Iraqi government become so beholden names were?” Saghie is not denying the many similarities to this man that it would cede control of its executions to in the techniques of social control between European his thugs? The fact of the matter was that the state, which totalitarianism and Iraqi Baathism; he is making the more had pushed for the hanging in the first place, was no longer interesting point that behind this communal power grab in present in the execution chamber, just as its authority was 1968 lay the “artificial” nature of the 1920s Iraqi state, and not present in the country as a whole. its historical inability or unwillingness to truly represent the nation as a whole—especially the Kurds and the Arab In power, the politics of victimhood, of blaming others Shi‘a. for one’s own inadequacies, is a measure of failure—in the Iraqi case, failure to rise to the historic occasion that the Saghie admits that before the Baath assumed power its 2003 overthrow of the Ba’th represented. No one talks more membership included young Sunnis as well as Shiites. And about ta’ifiyya, the sectarianism of others, than the new he takes note of moments in the modern history of Iraq, in Shiite rulers of Iraq and their spokesmen, both inside and the late 1950s and early 1960s, when a trans-sectarian and

3 trans-ethnic Iraqi middle class emerged, with a public life beginning in 2004 as Minister of Defense and was the centered in . Unfortunately he makes no mention Minister of Commerce in the new Iraq. The most striking of the large amount of scholarship that suggests that it thing about this book of over 500 pages is the curious was under the monarchy, not in the Qassem period, that fact that it never once mentions an occasion when Iraqis a dynamic of integration was achieved according to which as Iraqis—not as Shi‘a or Sunni Iraqis—acted in concert elites from all the different regions of Iraq were drawn with one another over anything. Completely excluded upon for public service. “The selection processes,” utilized from Allawi’s account, for example, is any assessment by the monarchical state “involved...ethnic and communal of the main truly national force in modern Iraqi politics, balance in terms of Kurds, Arabs, Shiites, Sunnis and the , which dominated opposition Christians,” writes Faleh Abd al-Jabar.4 politics from the 1940s through the early 1970s, and whose membership included all sects and nationalities but Whatever the actual experience of integration before was predominantly Shiite. ’s twenty-year 1968, however, Saghie argues that the actual experience study of that party, a massive scholarly undertaking of of holding power from 1968 to 2003 gradually pushed the some 1,300 pages, is dismissed in one sentence for having Baath party to establish the army as a Sunni instrument “ignored the evolution of the Islamic movement.”8 of social control—and the regime as a whole from the 1980s onwards, he asserts, became the “most important There is a reason, on the other hand, why Batatu ignores guarantor of [Sunni] security.” He concludes, therefore, the Islamic movement: It did not exist during his book’s that “the totalitarianism of Saddam Hussein was both a primary time frame. Allawi himself concedes that Iraqi product of the historic failure to build an Iraqi nation- politics were “devoid of any serious Islamist content” state, and itself a barbaric scheme [of] nation-building.”5 until the late 1950s, which is very late in the process of But it was a scheme that ultimately failed, according state formation that began in the 1920s.9 But that raises to Saghie—who proposes understanding why the Iraqi the question why that was so. Allawi dates political Shiite government executed Saddam Hussein in the sectarian to the founding of the Islamic Dawa Party in way that it did by looking at the social constructs invoked in the autumn of 1958, without mentioning that it was the in Ibn Khaldun’s analysis of ‘asabiyya, or blood solidarity.6 horror of Shiite mujtahids (clerical authorities) at the loss of Paramount among these is the concept of honor, which their authority over young Shiites to the Iraqi Communist requires that a man like the Iraqi prime minister and his Party that led them to take political action in the first colleagues stand by their own community through thick place.10 and thin. It behooves us to remember that if Shi‘as today are 55– Saghie’s study is an insightful formulation by a secular 60 percent of the population of Iraq, they became this and nonaligned close observer of Arab politics with majority only very recently. Massive conversions to Shiism experience of the and of the Lebanese occurred during the nineteenth century as the bulk of communal system of government. It lays out the logic Iraq’s nominally Sunni Arab tribes settled down and took behind a position that is increasingly prevalent in up agriculture. The British census of 1919 put the Shi‘as at academic circles and is today making its way into policy 53 percent of the population, but about 5 percent of these in the U.S. Congress in the form of the Biden plan for the were Persians. The Arab Shi‘a, in other words, were not “soft partition” of Iraq—and it explains the behavior of the a clear majority of the population at the end of the first new Shiite political class that was brought into power by quarter of the twentieth century. Moreover, the converts the elections of 2005, and that sought to settle accounts kept the moral and social values indigenous to their with the arch-representative of Sunniism in Iraq, Saddam Arab tribal origins and had more in common with their Hussein. The ‘asabiyya of the new Shiite political elite takes Sunni counterparts—who might even be from the same the form of a deep-seated and thoroughgoing reluctance to tribe—than they had with anyone else. If anything, the treat Sunni Arabs as equal partners in the building of the disintegration of their former Sunni tribal confederations new Iraq because of historical injustices that the Sunni split the new Shi‘a apart, as some became landowners community as a whole is held responsible for—injustices while the bulk remained landless. A crisis of identity that that Shiite politicians seek compensation for through the is still going on today naturally accompanied these massive new Oil Law, for example, and by making it difficult for cultural and sociological transformations. Sunnis to enter the police force or join the army. No sooner had Iraq’s Shi‘a become a majority than they had Speaking for that new political elite is Ali Allawi, in to contend with the reactionary attitude of their marjaiyya, his recently published magisterial insider account of based in , with respect to the newly forming Iraqi post-2003 Iraq.7 Allawi served for two and a half years state. In 1922, three of the most influential mujtahids issued

4 separate fatwas declaring that participation of in the centrifugal forces pulling the country apart, Allawi, the upcoming elections for the Constituent Assembly was who put his heart into making the new Iraq a success, is unlawful. Mahdi al-Khalisi’s fatwa was particularly harsh: in effect denying that the idea has ever had currency in the “We have passed judgment against the elections. Whoever culture throughout the nearly eighty years that the state takes part in them is fighting God, the Prophet, and the has been in existence. Presiding over Iraq as the Coalition , and will not be buried in Muslim cemeteries.”11 forces arrived, Allawi writes, was “a fearful, heavily Shiite clerical authorities, went on to oppose Shiites armed minority”—that is, the Sunnis—whose decaying accepting government office and to object to participation institutions and ruling ideology masked the real dangers in the state school system, even though King Faisal had of “divisiveness, vengefulness, deeply held grievances reserved the post of Minister of Education for Shiites, and bottled-up ethnic and sectarian passions” lurking perhaps in the hope of outmaneuvering the mujtahids. underneath Iraqi Arab society.12 With the newly converted Arab Shi‘as facing this kind of traditionalist assault on any possibility of political advance, Does the extent of the collapse of the state, and the is it any wonder that in the 1940s they turned away from extraordinary fragmentation of authority that accompanied their reactionary mujtahids, to the Iraqi Communist Party it, call into question the political viability of something and integration into Iraqi society? called Iraq? Saghie and Allawi are saying so, and some non- Arab scholars in the West agree with them. The fact that The Dawa Party was the original seed out of which grew no Iraqi politician other than Allawi will publicly follow all of the Islamist political parties that gained power suit is not surprising. During ’s thirteen-year after American military action in 2003. Two Iraqi prime civil war, that country’s leaders competed as vigorously ministers since the 2005 elections have come from the over their nonexistent patriotism as they prosecuted leadership of the Dawa Party, which oversaw the trial and massacres on one another. But at least the vestiges of a hanging of Saddam Hussein. The biggest irony surrounding political community remained. In 1989 those same leaders the role of the Dawa Party in Iraq today, however, concerns met around a table, and the very same set of men who its size: This was always a small party, never exceeding, had murdered each other’s families wholesale began in according to its own sources, more than a few hundred the 1990s to share the spoils of office. In Iraq, by contrast, activists during its heyday in the late 1970s and 1980s. the rupture with the past has been near-total. One cannot This sharply contrasts with the hundreds of thousands begin to imagine how Iraqis will pick up the pieces and who either joined or were fellow travelers of the Iraqi reassemble a set of working political institutions. Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s. Coming from two entirely different perspectives, these Even today, despite being in power and running the thoughtful and self-critical Arab writers, one with government in Iraq, the Dawa Party is minuscule in size. considerable knowledge of the wider Arab world, the When it held its party conference in the Rashid Hotel other with a Shiite Islamist background and close personal in Baghdad early in 2007, voting in Nouri al-Maliki, the ties with the men ruling Iraq today, converge in equally current prime minister as its head, less than a hundred depressing assessments of post-2003 Iraq. Both are saying, people attended. By contrast, some four thousand people in a nutshell: Iraq has never existed as a meaningful focus attended the party conference of the Iranian-backed of allegiance and loyalty for large numbers of people. Both Supreme Islamic Council, held two months later—which is Hazem Saghie and Ali Allawi were early skeptics with not so much a measure of their influence over Iraq’s Shiites respect to the idea of Iraq, long before Senator Biden and as it is a reflection of Iranian influence in post-Saddam his colleagues in the American Congress came to the same Iraq. Dawa Party activists will privately admit that their conclusion on account of the turmoil of the last few years. numbers are so small in Iraq that the party is in real danger Perhaps this skepticism explains why both opposed the of disappearing from the national scene if it ever loses 2003 war. Curiously, however, both pull back from drawing control of the prime ministership. The Dawa Party survives, the logical political conclusion from this skepticism. and controls that office, solely because it serves as a Neither has advocated replacing the “artificial” state of balancing force between the Supreme Islamic Council, run Iraq with some other arrangement—although Saghie has as a fiefdom by the Hakim family, and Muqtada al-Sadr’s recently toyed with the idea of city-states as a solution to Mahdi Army, who were in the room in which Saddam was the problem of legitimacy of the modern Arab state in the executed and who taunted him as he stood on the scaffold. Middle East.

To return to Saghie and Allawi’s dismissal of Iraq: If Saghie Allawi has moved in a different direction. In a 2007 is telling us that the idea of Iraq remained very weak at interview, a year after his book appeared, Allawi made the time of the removal of the Baath, as compared with this assessment of the country of his birth: “Knowing

5 what I know about Iraq, I would probably opt for order Saddam’s regime is that life inside it was “nasty, brutish, rather than liberation.”13 I cannot think of a more bleak and short,” and that it was the political expression of Sunni and depressing assessment. Consider it carefully. Is Allawi Arab minority rule. saying that the Iraq that he so loyally served for all practical purposes does not exist unless someone as ruthless as Until the uprising of 1991, however, the evidence is Saddam Hussein is in power? Is he agreeing, in other overwhelming that the majority of Iraq’s Shi‘a population words, with Saddam Hussein that the dictator and the accepted the legitimacy of the Baathi regime, even though country were one and the same? Because given the failure most of the personnel in its upper echelons were Sunni at governance of the Shiite Islamist elite of which Allawi is Arabs. I am not thinking about the activities of a minority such an exemplary chronicler, no other conclusion can be of Shiite Islamists in the Dawa Party inside Iraq or in the drawn from these words. Supreme Islamic Council, headquartered in until 2003. Nor am I referring to how many Shiites were left To every idea that we adopt as political actors, there is a in the upper echelons of the army and the Baath party corresponding psychological reality that explains the (the main criterion used by both Saghie and Allawi). I am hold that that idea has managed to exercise over our referring, rather, to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary, imagination. This reality is necessarily of a piece with the nonpolitical Shiite Iraqis who served for eight long and political idea. Iraq is such an idea. On the eve of the 2003 terrible years in the Iraqi army, fighting their fellow war, that idea was still alive, in spite of the abuse it had Shiites in . To be sure, they never wanted to fight in suffered from being embodied by Saddam’s regime—or so the first place. But you cannot explain their staying with many Iraqis thought. Even if Iraq were a kind of Pandora’s the Saddam regime, and their acting against their natural Box, lifting the lid of which ran the risk of releasing hordes feeling of asabiyya (social cohesion), only on the basis of of untamable furies, still in theory, at least, one could their fear of his firing squads. Something else was at work manage those furies artfully, so as to subdue and eventually here. Nor do we need to resort to patriotism or love of Iraq contain their destructiveness. Politics was that art. The to understand what it was. beginning of hope for Iraqis like myself in 2003, therefore, lay in separating a good thing—the idea—from a bad Baathi criminality implicated everyone, as I have gone to thing—the state. What actually transpired, however, say great lengths to show in all my work: In Cruelty and Silence, Saghie and Allawi—beginning with the massive looting on for example, the story of Umar is that of an innocent young the day of liberation and culminating in the execution of Sunni Arab engineer, who is informed upon by a Kurd and Saddam Hussein—was a wholesale rejection of the idea of tortured by a Shiite. That is the story of Iraq; it teaches Iraq itself. that complicity creates real political ties that cut across sect and ethnicity. Victims and victimizers effortlessly But who rejected it? The people who turned out to vote in changed roles both before and after 2003; that was possible record numbers in 2005? The first thing to notice about this only because Saddam broke down the sectarian and tribal analysis is how completely it exonerates the new Shiite- affiliations his regime inherited in 1968, just as he broke dominated ruling class of all responsibility—putting the down the authority structure within families when he blame, if that is the right word, on the behavior of ordinary got sons to inform on, or beat, their own fathers.14 This Iraqis. History and sociology are the main tools of that key political tie, which links virtually every Iraqi to the exoneration; ostensibly they explain the shameful behavior outgoing regime of the Baath, is entirely missing in Saghie of the Maliki government. But surely it is possible to be a and Allawi’s analysis. Introducing it into the equation true sectarian and still execute your outgoing president changes everything. with more dignity than was the case on December 30, 2006? At the core of understanding Baathi Iraq, I submit, is not sociology; it is the form of government that was able to The problem is that Saghie and Allawi focus on divisions command such allegiance. Politics is an autonomous and that they assume have been there in one form or another separate sphere, distinct from sociology or history.15 Both for centuries. Neither is interested in that which is specific Allawi and Saghie end up relying on a form of sociological to and exceptional about Baathi rule, which did, after all, determinism that is closer to Marx than it is to liberal last thirty-five years—longer than any other Iraqi regime theory, in either its classical or its more communitarian in the modern period. Was 1968 a watershed year in the form. There are important divisions in Iraq, to be sure, as history of modern Iraq—at least as important as 1932 and there are in every society. But do they shape the political 1958—or not? If it was, then how does an emphasis on system the way, for instance, they do in Lebanon? Did the Shi‘a victimhood or blood relations in politics even begin Baath before 1991 ever try to legitimize their rule on the to explain its importance? All that interests them about basis of Sunniism? There is nothing in their literature to

6 that effect. In fact, when Saddam Hussein chose to publish his family tree, he traced his origins to ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, Endnotes the patron saint of Shiism. Why would he do that? What was the criterion of membership in the Arab polity that he 1 James Menendez, “Seeking justice in Dujail,” BBC News. November 25, 2005.* was absolute ruler of? 2 See Hazem Saghie, “Saddam Hussein: Which Totalitarianism?” unpublished English manuscript. It was first This is how the Iraqi Legal Reform Law, promulgated in published in French in Le livre noir de Saddam Hussein [The Black Book 1977, answers the question: “the people are the source of of Saddam Hussein], Chris Kutschera et al eds. (Paris: Oh Edition, the legitimacy of authority.... But in exercising democracy... 2005). See the Iraq Memory website for the Arabic version.* All quotations are from the English manuscript. it is inevitable to exclude all persons who take a political, 3 Saghie, “Saddam Hussein: Which Totalitarianism?” p. 18. economical or intellectual attitude hostile to the 4 See Faleh A. Jabar, The Shi’ite Movement in Iraq (: Saqi, Revolution.”16 Clearly it was loyalty to the party, to the 2003), pp. 56–57. principles of the Revolution, and ultimately to the person 5 Saghie, “Saddam Hussein: Which Totalitarianism?” p. 7. of Saddam Hussein that was the decisive criterion of 6 See “‘Asabiyya,” s.v. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1979). citizenship in Baathi Iraq, not sectarian allegiance. 7 Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). The point is that Iraqis, like everyone else, have changing, 8 Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 37, referring to Hanna Batatu, overlapping, and plural identities, and it is a gross The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of simplification to reconstruct the whole of modern Iraqi Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Ba’thists, and Free Officers (London: Saqi, 2004). political history as a sectarian partitioning between rulers 9 Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 26. and ruled. The very term Shi‘a is a loose cultural designation 10 On this point, see Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq and not a reference to a closely knit body of people. Most of (Princeton, NJ: Press, 1994), p. 134. In 1960, the time these people did not think of themselves as Shi‘a, the Shiite mujtahid Muhsin al-Hakim issued a fatwa (religious in fact, until their mujtahids, along with urban intellectuals, ruling) attacking Communism by name and pronouncing it incompatible with Islam. began to push them in that direction in the 1980s and 11 Cited in Ibid., pp. 79–80. For a thorough discussion of the 1990s. negative attitudes toward the state expressed by Shiite clerics, see chapter 4, “The Search for Political Representation.” Politics, in the form of the choices we make, decides 12 Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq, p. 16. which among overlapping identities we give priority to at 13 See the article by Dexter Filkins, “Regrets Only?” in the New York Times Magazine, October 7, 2007. any given point in time. Thus, in the late 1950s the mass 14 “You must surround adults through their sons,” Saddam said of Iraq’s Shi‘a joined the Iraqi Communist Party, but in in a speech. “Teach the student to object to his parents.... Teach 2005 those very same masses voted for the Shiite Islamist them to criticize their mothers and fathers.... You must place parties that today control the Iraqi government. Why they in every corner a son of the Revolution.” From Al-Dimuqratiyya shifted from the one to the other is a political question, Masdar Quwwa li al-Fard wa al-Mujtama’ (Baghdad: Al-Thawra Publications, 1977). not a reflection of some backward-looking romantic 15 Stanley Hoffman sees this as one of the most important or communal dynamic. The same “masses” who were themes in Judith Shklar’s contribution to political thought. See Communist became Islamist—and they were as genuinely his article “Judith Shklar as a Political Thinker,” in Bernard Yack, Communist back then as they were genuinely Islamist after Liberalism without Illusions: Essays on Liberal Theory and the Political 2003. Neither sociology nor religiosity has anything to do Vision of Judith N. Shklar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). with it. The fact is that the quality of being an Iraqi is today 16 See “The Source of Authority,” pp. 131–38 in Kanan Makiya, still up for grabs. Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam’s Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 1989), for an extended analysis of this document.

* Weblinks are available in the PDF version found at www.brandeis.edu/crown

7 Is Iraq Viable? Prof. Kanan Makiya

Recent Middle East Briefs: Available on the Crown Center website: http://www.brandeis.edu/crown

Farideh Farhi, “Iran’s 2008 Majlis Elections: The Game of Elite Competition,” May 2008, No. 29

Ondrej Beranek, “The Sword and the Book: Implications of the Intertwining of the Saudi Ruling Family and the Religious Establishment,” April 2008, No. 28

Asher Susser, “: Preserving Domestic Order in a Setting of Regional Turmoil,” March 2008, No. 27

Dror Ze’evi, “Clans and Militias in Palestinian Politics,” March 2008, No. 26

Marc Lynch, “The Brotherhood’s Dilemma,” January 2008, No. 25

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